Apartment Look

When our children were 11 and 9, young enough to still be entirely inside the family circle but old enough to remember, we splurged on a “once in a lifetime vacation ” and rented a small farmhouse in Southwestern France outside the village of Saint-Cyprien. Each day, our son and daughter would say goodbye to the donkey that hung around our patio and we’d climb in the tiny rented Renault and drive somewhere in the fairy- tale beautiful Dordogne River region . On one of these excursions, we stumbled on the provincial city of Sarlat. An accident of history and several centuries of stagnant economy had left Sarlat’s center virtually unchanged architecturally since the days of siege engines and knights galloping over drawbridges. City fathers had wakened one morning in the late 1950s to realize that, leaning above narrow and winding cobblestone streets and alleys, they had one of the largest collections of intact medieval architecture in Europe. The French government subsidized restor...

THUNDER BAY -- Construction of new housing units on the city's north side is proceeding at a brisk pace this summer. No fewer than seven separate projects are either already completed or on the drawing board. The newest development, now under construction, is a 24- unit apartment building on Royston Court, between the former provincial land registry office and HMCS Griffin Naval Reserve . Red River Holdings is the developer. City hall has also received an application for a building permit to convert the old land registry office to an 8- unit apartment building . The location of the two projects is less than a block north of the former Superior Court of Justice on Camelot Street, which a Toronto developer plans to convert to a hotel. The application for a building permit is expected to be submitted soon. Elsewhere in the north core, Syncor Contracting is working on the third of three 12- unit apartment buildings...